… the Trump administration is embracing Nazi propaganda, trying to convince Americans that the nation’s roots are not in human equality but in the hierarchical system of European fascism. Rejecting the idea of liberty and equality proposed in the Declaration of Independence and defended by people like Abraham Lincoln as the nation’s foundational principle, they are trying to define the United States of America in an entirely new way: one made up of white Protestants who, in their minds, “belong” to the land here. Rather than a nation based in ideals, they want a nation based in “blood and soil.”
In the 1770s, and again in the 1850s, everyday Americans recognized the radicalism of those extremists who were trying to erase the nation’s principles and the rule of law, ignoring the longstanding rights of the people to liberty and equality and instead trying to impose a despotism.
Today a protester in Minneapolis, one of those tens of thousands who filled the streets in below-zero weather to demand that ICE end its violent occupation of their city and its abuse of immigrants and people of color, made it clear that Americans in 2026 still believe in the nation’s founding principles of equality and the rule of law, and they utterly reject the right wing’s blood-and-soil radicalism.
— Heather Cox Richardson, Letters From An American, January 23, 2026